Training for 3km

Hi everyone. I've been reading and enjoying as much of this site as I can since I'm pretty new to swimming as a sport. I've got a background in Strongman competition, got bored with that and decided during the summer that I wanted to swim an open water race...so I'm here for help :)Any help is greatly appreciated!

Just now since I'm so new to everything I'm trying to work endurance, technique and speed at the same time. I'm swimming 1000m twice a week trying to get my time down to 20minutes, which I think might be a decent race time. When I've done that I'll up the distance and work again on getting a good time.

Comments

The best thing I ever did for my swim training is to have a written plan in hand before showing up to the pool. I find that breaking down a 1000m workout, for example, is much more enjoyable, and do-able if you break that into something like the following:

1 x 200m warm-up4 x 100 (whatever)4 x 50 (whatever)1 x 200 cool down

I assume the same theory applies to lifting as well. This becomes more important when you have a 3000-4000 yard / meter workout in a pool since swimming that distance without a well defined plan is a recipe for cutting the workout short.

I recommend mixing in drills with every one of your sessions as well, especially since you're only doing two per week. Those were very beneficial for me.

Another thing to note is that when I started swimming (last year sometime) I had only 1 speed so the timing stuff the more seasoned swimmers talk about was useless to me. Now that I've been doing this for a year or so I have 3 - 4 speeds: warm-up / easy, moderate, sprint, and somewhere between moderate and sprint.

I agree with Laflamme02. I find that breaking up a distance, even 1000m is far more enjoyable than just doing the straight distance. Although every few weeks I do make sure that I do at least one long swim without rests to make sure that mentally I still know I can do the full distance in a single swim. I also usually start the swim with a set plan in my mind but often change it as I feel. Also have about 3 speeds, easy, moderate and sprint.